Help catching spammers

Hello to all digitalpointers I was going through some of the threads here and thought that this would be the place to seek some help and here is what I need help with.

I am a poster at a forum for a medical condition where people discuss different types of treatments and their effectiveness. A few months ago I noticed that there is a marked increase in the number of users advertising nothing but air, i.e., a quack with no medical qualifications. I have recovered from this condition, and I know that cure is not possible using nothing but air. Other posters have noted it as well, however there have been fights with fans of the quack invading anyone questioning them so nowadays most people avoid these members. However their numbers are increasing and newbies are falling victims to these quack fans.

The moderators have been informed, however 2 out of 6 are trying the quack's air treatment and so are not friendly. The others are friendly, but not very net savvy and having recovered themselves (medications) have a limited interest in what is going on.

What can I suggest to the one moderator who is friendly and actually wants to find out technically if the quack fans are all coming from proxies ?

Thanks for reading.

 

First - Sign up at the Stopforumspam website - http://stopforumspam.com/

Second - see if there is a SFS modification for the forum software the site is running.

Third - install the SFS add-on.

This will help out a lot on stopping the spammers.

 

Thank you for your kind reply ~kev~. I will join the Stop Forum Spam community. Most of the spam here (the forums that I go to) is manual, though bot posts do show up from time to time. Unfortunately unethical people will take advantage of desperate people not caring a bit for what happens to their victims so long as they pay them the money.

Thanks again.

 

The stopforumsite allows you to report the spammers, so they can not sign up on forums that run the modification.

I think I have reported close to 100 spammers. Some of the people on SFS have reported thousands of spammers.

This allows forum owners to work as a team. When I report a spammer, their blocked from signing up on your forum. And when you report a spammer, their blocked from signing up on other forums that use the SFS add-on.

 

What forum software are you on? I can send some suggestions if you use it.

 

There is one for MyBB, SMF, vBulletin and IPB I think. Stop Forum Spam is the best way and here is why. Nowadays spammers are not bot registrations, they are humans from developing countries that signup, THEN the account is passed to a bot to spam.

 

Thanks `kev` - I am going through the SFS and it does have a little learning curve.

Thanks Aw - We are on VBulletin. Any suggestions welcome.

Thanks ccalby - Yes, more and more bots are humans. I have a link to a site that has an article stating an income of $3/hour for spammers. If the moderators don't mind I will put a link here.

 

You'd think vBulletin would have better options considering, you know, they're commercial and the most expensive of all of them.

http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=248042

This is what most of my vBulletin friends use. You should also add Q&A CAPTCHA over anything else and add maybe 10-20 questions.

 

Just butting in but didn't you said you are poster ? How will you install in the modification if you're not the admin ? This type of problem is usually deal with care since you might nuke a big part of the forum population .

 

-Aw- Thanks for your reply. I will go through the link. We cannot add a lot of questions as most of the members here are sick people and most of them will fail in test.

ApocalypseXL - Thanks for your reply. Yes I am not able to install the modification, but it will help us if only we knew that all the posters advertising air as cure were coming through proxy servers.

 

We found a few accounts here that were listed on SFS, so a big THANK YOU to you folks. We are going about it the manual way for now.

Can someone here help me with this question - is there no way to identify an account if it is coming through a proxy server (apart from if it is blacklisted in SFS).